This all started not long ago when my daughter and son-in-law bought their first "real" house. All very exciting, of course, after living in a third-floor unit since they were married (not to mention better for me – how I hated those six flights of stairs!).

It is a reasonably old house and while a bit of spit and polish made it perfectly liveable, it suffered from 20^th century wiring.

Most obvious was the lack of power outlets – for example, just two in the kitchen (and one of those was for the ’fridge). But just as noticeable (at least to me after my adventures last month with structured cabling systems and the "miniLAN") was the complete lack of communications and data cabling.

Of course, neither of these problems were overly surprising. Back when this home was built they only put one power outlet in each room because there wasn’t the proliferation of appliances and devices of today. And as for data, well, home computers hadn’t even been invented yet; TV was in its infancy (no family had more than one, if that) and what was a VCR?

It’s only in recent times that builders of new homes have started to put in almost as many power outlets as needed (Murphy’s law again – the number of power points in any given room is always n-1, where n is the required number).

Superb under-floor access meant no crawling around - in fact, a ladder was needed to reach the floor above! Inset is a close-up of one side of the garage: lying on the floor is just some of the dangerous wiring we removed. Ignore the rest of the junk - the garage proved too tempting to store stuff while moving in...

And it’s only in very recent times – if at all – that builders of new homes have started to worry about data and communications cabling.

As we said last month, while building is in progress is by far the best time to take future needs into consideration. An extra couple of hundred dollars’ worth of cable and sockets while access is dead easy could save a lot of heartaches in the future – when it’s not!

But this was not a new house. Sure, they were planning on giving it a bit of TLC – as much as their budget would stretch, that is.

But I thought it would be a good opportunity to put my new-found knowledge on structured cabling to the test, in a domestic (as distinct from a business) situation.

What’s more, it could be grist for the SILICON CHIP mill: perhaps readers would like some ideas of what they could do themselves?

"Would you like to have your home data and communications wiring updated?" I asked. "How much will it cost?" was their reply. "Not much at all," I said.